That is, they will if you abstain from all physical activity.

A lot of people seem to miss that crucial stipulation. I’ve come across far too many misguided tirades aimed at massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft that claim that players of such games are nothing more than fat nerds with no life who live in their parents’ basement. Really? Simply buying a subscription to WoW adds 200 or so pounds instantly? Of course not. It’s a baseless claim made by people who want to act sanctimonious. Or, even worse, by people who were overweight WoW players and are turning a blind eye to the behaviors and habits that really made them fat, preferring instead to find a scapegoat.

Why pick this specific topic? Well, I play World of Warcraft. I’ve been a subscriber for the past five or six months. And yet, my weight is proportional to my height. I have a friend who has been playing for longer than I have, and he’s in the same boat. Guess that blows the theory that all WoW players are overweight right out of the water, doesn’t it?

So what does make people overweight? A number of things, but it seems that it’s commonly bad habits combined with lack of physical activity. In other words, if you eat junk food all the time, spend hours in front of the computer every day, and never get on a treadmill, you’re going to be horribly out of shape when compared to someone who eats junk food only occasionally, spends less time in front of the computer, and exercises regularly.

The important thing to remember: World of Warcraft and physical activity are not–I repeat, not–mutually exclusive. Sure, WoW itself doesn’t require any movement beyond your hands. Neither does reading. And what kind of insane person would suggest that reading makes you fat?

Finally, there’s the claim that WoW is designed to be addicting. I’d really like that one explained to me because I don’t see what’s so addicting about grinding and questing my ass off to gain a level just so I can do it all over again until I reach the level cap and have to kill real people instead. (Note: when I say “people”, I really mean “computer-generated avatars of real people”. Just to avoid any confusion from the crazies who think I’m advocating real-life violence as a form of entertainment.) Besides, getting addicted to WoW is like getting addicted to gambling. You played too much and didn’t know when to stop. That’s not the fault of the game, considering there are plenty of people who play WoW and lead perfectly normal lives free of addiction.

Anyone who rips on WoW players as being fat losers who never move needs to think back to any time they curled up in a chair and read a book for a few hours. Any physical activity beyond turning the page? If not, how is it any different? Spend hours upon hours reading Shakespeare’s assorted works and snacking on Cheetos and you’re going to end up the same as if you had spent hours upon hours playing WoW and snacking on Cheetos: overweight and unhealthy. Think about that.

Or not.

The focus of the annual pissing contest in Washington this year is a sign put up at the capitol building in Olympia by the atheist group Freedom from Religion Foundation saying, among other things, that religion is nothing but myth and superstition. The response? First it was stolen, then Bill O’Reilly chimed in about how awful and un-Christian it was, then it was returned, and finally, a local evangelical church organized an anti-atheist protest a pro-faith rally complete with their own sign claiming that atheism is nothing but myth and superstition. Yeah. It’s worse than the Christmas tree–er, holiday tree–incident at SeaTac a couple years ago.

Both groups are in the wrong here. The atheist group was obviously trolling with their rather provocative sign (it would have been fine without the religion dig), but the Christians who responded negatively were no better, especially with their signs claiming Governor Gregoire is a Grinch or the balloon nativity scene featuring Bill O’Reilly beating up on the governor (so I’ve heard). At any rate, the governor has repeatedly insisted that all religious (and non-religious) displays will be tolerated at the capitol building. I hear some people are even planning on erecting a Festivus pole.

Anyways, as the three-man counter-protesters said, “Get over it.” The atheist sign certainly crossed the line once it started disparaging religion, but the simple fact of the matter is that the holiday season doesn’t just mean Christmas. And while I know for a fact that there are a lot of Christians out there who understand that, there are still a bunch who don’t get it and probably never will. Bah, humbug.

My opinion on the issue is mixed. I see no reason same-sex couples shouldn’t get the same benefits as heterosexual couples. I also don’t have anything against calling it marriage. Language is fluid. Definitions change as society changes. However, I am not willing to push to change that definition prematurely. People naturally resist sudden change. Subtle changes over a long period of time, however, usually go unnoticed. For that reason, I advocate civil unions with the same rights and benefits as marriage but under a different name.

It’s common sense to me. As a pragmatist, I understand the importance of compromise. The main objection to same-sex marriage is the name. You know the old refrain: marriage is defined as a union between a man and a woman. While it’s true that definition isn’t set in stone, it’s going to take a while before it can change. I say it’s better to fight for the rights and leave the name for later instead of fighting for the whole thing now and getting nothing. Slow and steady results produce results. They may not happen quickly, but they happen.

The usual response here is that separate but equal is not equal. I dispute that. If two things are the same in every way except in name, they are still equal. Once they become unequal, they are no longer separate but equal. It’s a rather obvious truism but I’ve come across a lot of people who don’t get it. I agree that the ideal thing is to have marriage for everyone. But that’s not going to happen easily. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against gay marriage. But I think that fighting tooth and nail for it against opponents who have shown time and again that they will not budge is detrimental. More antagonism is not what the gay marriage movement needs.

I may seem like a defeatist. An appeaser, even. It’s true: I’m no idealist. But I like to think that I know how important it is to make sure the other side is content. Proposition 8 is proof enough that forcing something on an unwilling population will result in backlash. Gradual acclimation to the idea (especially assurance that gay marriage will not affect heterosexual marriage in any way) over time will most likely result in more states allowing gay marriage without resorting to judicial intervention.

Change minds, don’t force hands.

(Of course, there is the religious side of things, but that’s not the focus of this post. Don’t worry, I haven’t overlooked the religious right. I just know it’s futile to debate them.)

The latest weapon of the “HAY GAIZ, OSAMA IS A MUSLIM” campaign is the fact that Obama used to go by the name Barry Soetoro when he lived in Indonesia. This is hardly surprising considering that his mom married a guy with the last name Soetoro. Oh wait! That’s apparently bad, too! Why? Because Obama didn’t make it public. No, I’m serious. Apparently, presidential candidates are supposed to be up front about everything in their lives, regardless of how important it is to the job they’re pursuing. And this isn’t that important. From what little I’ve been able to dig up on the whole Barry Soetoro thing (seriously, search for the name on Google and you’ll get pretty much all anti-Obama links), it wasn’t a legal name change, which means it has absolutely no impact on anything. Just like McCain’s five years as a POW. It’s irrelevant to the presidency.

The argument goes that if Obama used to go by a different name, he could be a different religion (?) or even have a dual citizenship (?!). There’s scant evidence to this effect, and a dual citizenship wouldn’t necessarily bar Obama from the presidency. The requirements, listed in the Constitution, say that a person must be a natural-born citizen of the United States, be 35 years old, and have lived in the U.S. for at least 14 years. There’s nothing in there about dual citizenships, but, to be fair, dual citizenships didn’t exactly exist when the Constitution was written. It’s a rather weak attack on Obama, but that’s nothing new. After all, the secret Muslim accusation has been flying around forever and we still have yet to hear what’s wrong with being a Muslim…

The uproar surrounding this election is proof the world has gone insane. Rationality flew out the window a long time ago and it depresses me. I really can’t wait until November so this can all finally be over. Of course, I’m being optimistic. Even if Obama was to win in a landslide, the anti-Obama crowd would claim he stole the election (kind of like how the anti-McCain crowd will claim McCain stole the election if he wins) or whine about how the country will go downhill now that a Muslim is president. I don’t think I’ll ever escape from the madness.

I recently purchased the game Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts. I had purchased the original Company of Heroes quite a while ago, but I had never finished it. So, I decided to re-install the original before dealing with Opposing Fronts. After a rather arduous process of patching, I was ready to play. Upon loading it up, it seemed that the patches had installed data for Opposing Fronts as well as the original, since the menu included the campaigns from the new game. I couldn’t play them without an Opposing Fronts CD key, but I didn’t want to deal with that right then. I played the game (picking up where I had left off) and finished the campaign. Now for Opposing Fronts.

I stuck the DVD into the drive and the autoplay came up. However, there was no option to install. There was an option to play the game, which seemed to verify my theory that the patches had installed the Opposing Front data. All I needed to do was stick the CD key in. I started up the game and did just that. After a short time, everything was in order. The main menu had a different background image (that of a British soldier instead of an American soldier) and the Opposing Fronts campaigns were available. I clicked on one and got the following message: “Notice: You do not have the necessary data to play this campaign.” Er, what? Didn’t I already have all the data? Why on Earth did I put the CD key in if not to unlock the data? Why didn’t the Opposing Fronts DVD ask me to install the game?

Answers were not easily found. After quite a bit of searching online, I eventually found that the Opposing Fronts DVD has the data for both the original Company of Heroes as well as the standalone sequel. The original game disks didn’t have any of the sequel data. Thus, the only way to play the later campaigns is to uninstall the original, install from the Opposing Fronts DVD, and patch everything once again. Seriously. This solution is so absurd I refused to believe it was the only way. Why would a game developer force people to uninstall the original game so they could play the sequel? No other game I’ve played has done this. If a sequel is released, you install it separately from the original or as an expansion. In any case, something needs to be installed. Since I wasn’t prompted to install anything after putting in the Opposing Fronts DVD, I didn’t think I needed to do anything. But I did, and now I have to patch my game all over again, which was not a short process the first time around…

Honestly, Relic, you could have done better than this. Company of Heroes is an excellent game. But the installation process almost makes me want to throw both games in a dark drawer and forget about them. If you’re looking to lose customers, there’s no better way to do it than to pretend updating is easy when it’s maddeningly roundabout. Seriously, what’s up with the bit about being able to add the Opposing Fronts CD key in the original Company of Heroes install? If I need to reinstall all the data, why not say that outright?!

Anyways, I figured I’d write this since there is very little information available on this message. As far as I could tell, none of the posts related to this issue had any comments by Relic employees, which is pretty bad. Perhaps they realized they made a rather egregious mistake in the way this was all set up? We may never know.

(Hear that, political campaigns? Your negative attack ads have jaded me so much that I don’t particularly care for any of you. If your plan was to alienate possible supporters, you are doing a fine job. Carry on.)

I suppose I could have ignored all that for the good links I do sometimes find, but those links are few and far between, buried amidst all the noise of articles about how dumb Sarah Palin is, or the antics of some religious group, or stories about how the police tasered a guy who may or may not have attacked them first. I know what you’re thinking. “Cody! Unsubscribe from the politics, religion, and atheism subreddits!” I did, and somehow political and religious links still snuck in, under the guise of the funny subreddit or the WTF subreddit. It just wasn’t worth sticking around if I wasn’t getting what I wanted out of the website. What did I want? Interesting links, complete with intelligent discussion of said links. What did I get? Uninteresting links, complete with unintelligent babble about how the government is going to take over everything and use religion and Tasers to force everyone into submission. The gradual transformation into a mainstream version of /b/ didn’t help, either. Yeah, there were some pretty awesome memes (100 pushups, anyone?), but memes aren’t a good substitute for worthwhile comments and there are a lot of meme comments on Reddit.

My absence from Reddit probably won’t last. I doubt I’ll create another user account, but I did get a fair bit of my news from Reddit. Maybe the community will get better sometime in the future. Maybe not. I suppose I can’t avoid what I don’t like forever.

I’ve been on the receiving end of this sort of thing before. I was walking into a Subway once when I was stopped by someone hanging outside the restaurant, who accosted me for going to Subway when there was a local sandwich place just a few doors down. I had actually gone to that shop before, but I had never noticed a significant quality difference between their sandwiches and Subway’s sandwiches. They tasted pretty much the same. The kicker for me, however, was the fact that I could get a foot-long at Subway for $5. At the local shop, the cost was $8 for a similar foot-long. I may sound a bit callous for saying this, but I’m not going to spend an extra $3 just to support a local shop. I’m going to go for the best value, and I can usually find that at chains or franchises (franchises that, ironically, are often owned by the mom and pop types of people).

To be perfectly honest, I suppose I can see the reasoning behind disliking chains. They undercut prices, which causes small, mom and pop places to go out of business because they can’t afford to lower their prices. But that’s capitalism. Competition inevitably results in there being a winner and a loser (or multiple losers). Eventually, a new competitor arises that can actually compete on the same level as the winner. It’s not pretty, and it’s certainly not fair, but that’s life.

Yeah, it’s harsh. Probably harsher than I originally meant it to be. But my main point is that if I want to get a burger at McDonald’s instead of that place down the street, that should be my choice. I shouldn’t have to deal with people pestering me about it.